Skymap

About this project

Skymap renders nineteen orders of magnitude in a single scene with no scale breaks, from Earth's surface at about 10⁷ metres to the horizon of the observable universe at about 10²⁶ metres. Zoom out and you pass the planets, the Gaia star field, the galactic disk, and finally the cosmic web of roughly three million catalogued galaxies drawn from SDSS, 2MRS, GLADE, and Milliquas. Everything sits where its catalogue says it should. The guided tour, "The Long Way Out," plays the whole descent with captions and timed camera moves. You can also orbit freely, or jump to any object by name with Cmd+K, which reaches 48,000 PGC aliases and named structures. Other layers include 16.8 million Gaia DR3 stars, DisPerSE filaments and an MCPM density volume tracing the cosmic web, cluster, group and void markers from VizieR catalogues, the S-stars orbiting Sagittarius A* on their measured Keplerian elements, and a solar system running on a live clock with Saturn's rings and orbit trails. Earth has PBR shading, night lights, relief, clouds, an atmosphere, and streamed surface tiles down to city scale. Simulation time can be moved to any date and shared as a link. Skymap is built for teaching large-scale structure and for browsing the catalogues themselves. It requires WebGPU: Chrome 113+, Edge 113+, Firefox 141+ (145+ on Apple Silicon macOS), or Safari 26+. Developer and author - https://github.com/rulkens

Where it runs

This project runs on the creator's website. DEAD.ARMY opens the official HTTPS page in a new tab instead of embedding it. To report an unauthorized copy, misleading project page, or rights issue, email support@dead.army or review our reporting process.